She Explores the Universe with Photos, Ink, and Water | Short Film Showcase
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I've always been drawn to stories of exploration: the scope of the vision, the ambition of it, the amount of endurance required, and then, of course, the human history of facing the unknown and pushing into it. So, in 2015, my partner, Jamaican Alice, and I decided to embark on a great expedition across the United States. We titled the expedition "Red Charting Pre-Charted Territory" because we were trying to reference this history of exploration.
We wanted to explore that tradition as artists living, you know, in the 21st century. How do you paint a landscape as an artist in the 21st century? How do you explore the Great Western wilderness of the United States when it's already been totally explored, and it's all domesticated? There's very little wilderness, and what is so wild is highly managed.
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From that experience, we were on the road for about seven months. We came back home with about 14,000 photographs. So, I would say most of the work that I'm working on now is utilizing those images. You can't just stop and sit and try to think your way into an interesting idea. For me, at least, I have to really be engaging with something that has a lot of layers to it, that is inherently interesting or complex, in order to put myself in a space where I can take advantage of ideas as they emerge.
A lot of the subject matter in the collages are the subjects that I'm interested in working in my larger pieces. So then, when I do get an idea for the larger artwork, I'm already in motion, and I just take that energy from the collage process right into the body of work. This work is a part of a project that I've been working on for about five years. I take large sheets of paper, lay them on a flat cement pad, and hose it down with water, and then I can drop ink on it.
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When you spread ink onto wet paper, you get these forms that are reminiscent of clouds, of atmosphere, of cosmic weather. It is the same physics that dictate the movement of that ink on paper as the physics that dictate something that might be happening in a star factory, you know, millions or billions of miles away. But you can see it on a human scale, and you can watch it in the human time scale, so it's happening right in front of you.
When I create a piece of paper that's stained like this, you know, it really looks like a wild space. It's very unpredictable, very organic. And when I start to go in and work on the structures, they start to become like these little domesticated spaces in this wilderness. I think about the art-making process as kind of like going out into uncharted territory where you don't really know where you're going.
Making something that's already so beautiful more interesting requires, you know, a lot more sophistication on the part of my ideas. So, I'm working on something right now that's going to lead me to a space where I've learned something new about what's possible. To me, that's very exciting because it is this constant pushing forward into an unknown space to try to figure out what possibilities lie there.
You need to constantly be feeding your sense of wonder and your sense of curiosity.
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